Ashdown calls for an urgent rethink of the EU’s Bosnia policy

The European Union should urgently reconsider its policies towards Bosnia and Herzegovina, Paddy Ashdown, a former EU envoy to the country, has said, warning that the country is on a “move towards dissolution”.

He said that recent talks between Bosnian politicians, co-chaired by the EU and the United States, had been badly prepared and had made the situation worse.

“Europe has sleep-walked into this, but I hope it will wake up before this crisis makes the front pages,” he told European Voice on Tuesday (17 November).

Ashdown said that if the EU failed to stop the slide towards dissolution in Bosnia, “we have to ask whether the European Security and Defence Policy amounts to anything”.

“We are talking about the one country where the EU has deployed most of its foreign policy instruments at once,” he said.

Phasing out the OHR

Diplomats from the countries supervising Bosnia’s peace process are meeting today (19 November) in Sarajevo to discuss when and how the Office of the High Representative (OHR), the main international body in the country, should be closed. Diplomats suggested that the countries, convened as the Peace Implementation Council, would not take a decision until next year, contrary to earlier plans.

Once the OHR is phased out, the office of the EU Special Representative (EUSR) will take the lead in peace implementation, but it has fewer powers than the OHR. Since 2002, when the EU appointed Ashdown as its special envoy, the EUSR has also headed the OHR.

Ashdown said that the way in which the EU planned the recent talks between Bosnian politicians, known as the ‘Butmir process’, had further eroded the OHR’s “respect” among Bosnians.

“The OHR is a dead body and needs to be properly disposed of,” Ashdown said. He added that Javier Solana, the EU’s foreign policy chief, had “undermined” Miroslav Lajc?ák, the EUSR from 2007 until March of this year.

Ashdown was adamant that the international community should hold on to “reserve powers” over Bosnia’s politics and cited the Allied Control Council, which held ultimate legal authority over Germany until 1991, as an example.

“The legal difficulties [of retaining powers] are less than if we have to deal with an unravelling Bosnia,” he said.

He also rejected the argument – often made by Olli Rehn, the European commissioner for enlargement, and other EU officials – that international supervision was an obstacle to Bosnia’s political maturity and eventual membership of the EU.